POLAND:Poland's political crisis reached a new peak yesterday when police arrested a former minister who accused the government of spying on political rivals and media critics.
The arrest has sparked outrage across the political spectrum and convinced the last hesitant politicians to vote next week to dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections in October, two years early.
Critics accused the prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski yesterday of trying to create an "Orwellian state" and silence his former interior minister, Janusz Kaczmarek. Mr Kaczmarek has presented the Polish parliament with a 200-page dossier alleging widespread use of secret services and phone taps on critics of Mr Kaczynski's Law and Justice (PiS) party. The former interior minister said the surveillance was organised with the full knowledge of the prime minister.
Mr Kaczynski has dismissed the charges as "rubbish" and "fairy tales". A government spokesman has declined to comment directly on the phone tap allegations, saying only that "nothing illegal was done".
The full extent of the allegations are not yet fully known nor have the claims been proven. But the allegations are a stark contrast to the "moral revolution" and war on corruption promised when the government took office.
Yesterday at 7am, police detained Mr Kaczmarek in the full glare of television cameras. TV stations had been informed beforehand of the arrest, a common practice in the Kaczynski era.
Police say the former interior minister is suspected of blowing the whistle on a bribery sting involving another cabinet minister which brought about the end of the three-way coalition government after just over a year in office.
Government critics said yesterday's arrest was an attempt to silence Mr Kaczmarek as more of his dossier was to be read in parliament this morning.
"We have a Polish Watergate," said Roman Giertych, leader of the far-right League of Polish Families and education minister until he was recently sacked. "Wiretapping colleagues, using these wiretaps for political goals, arranging the detention or arrest of government colleagues: this is not the kind of activity which can be included in the canon of any code of conduct, aside from the gangsters' code."
The most surprising name mentioned in the alleged list of surveillance is former prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, who led a minority PiS government until Mr Kaczynski took over.
"I cannot rule out that I was eavesdropped on," he said on television yesterday. "We are living in an Orwellian state and we need to be aware of that."
